In a sunny corner of Tomoko and Kenji Usui’s garden, surrounded by marigolds and goldenrod, there stands a peculiar little house. The thatched roof is tall and pointy like a witch’s hat, with flowers growing around the brim. The porch is wide and shady, ...

Thursday night was warm and clear in Yokohama. A cloudless, gradually darkening sky stretched over the 400-meter track at the Yamato Sports Center — seemingly boundless in its ability to absorb the shouts and laughter coming from the 20 boisterous young members of the ...

A poster of one of Vincent van Gogh’s sunflowers is one of the traditional adornments to a student bedroom. The rest of us hang our reproductions in the knowledge that even the good ones are far from faithful to the originals — for which ...

When Kenji Miyazawa was writing his stories and poems nearly a century ago, Japan was a country with a two-pronged mission: To become the first non-white, non-Christian nation to create a modern prosperous state — and to be the leader of an Asian revival. ...

On its surface, the plan seems like an environmentalist’s dream come true: Take wreckage from the March 11, 2011, Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami in the Tohoku region of Honshu and pile it along the washed-out coastline; cover the crumbled concrete and broken ...

“Are you tourist?” asked the man seated beside me on the early afternoon flight from Tokyo’s Haneda airport to Kochi in Shikoku. He spoke in hesitant English. “Not exactly. I’m on my way to cover the Ekin Matsuri,” I replied in Japanese. “Ah, Ekin. ...

Smirks and snickering tend to greet any mention of “men’s rhythmic gymnastics,” as the phrase conjures up images of chaps in tights prancing around swinging ribbons or clutching squeezy balls to their chests like the sport’s female exponents. That couldn’t be further from the ...

“After a performance at the 232-seat Maison de la Culture du Japon in Paris, one of the Japanese staff there said I had a ‘splendid voice.’ I didn’t buy anything in Paris, but that was the best possible souvenir,” said Kiyoshi Takahashi, 85, the ...

To date, including his all-male production of “The Merchant of Venice” that’s set to run next month at Sainokuni Saitama Arts Theater outside Tokyo, Yukio Ninagawa will have staged 29 of the 38 plays attributed to William Shakespeare — and his ambition to direct ...

In July 1969, a leak of chemical weapons on Okinawa sickened more than 20 U.S. soldiers and laid bare one of the Pentagon’s biggest Cold War secrets: the storage of toxic munitions outside of continental United States. Public outrage following the Okinawa accident forced ...